Thread by @Gwynnion

I've thought a lot lately about how the anti-abortion movement was invented out of thin air in the 1970s and 80s by Francis Schaeffer and Republicans eager for a new wedge issue to peel voters away from Democrats after desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement.

Not to mention how abortion became the template for all subsequent "moral" crusades by the far right and how "religious rights," as a proxy for racism and other forms of discrimination and a cynical means of grabbing power, took over and redefined the GOP.

I mean, you can't entirely blame Schaeffer. Jerry Falwell and his gang of racists would have done anything to destroy Democrats, even an evangelical Democrat like Jimmy Carter, and ensure Republican dominance. And Reagan was equally eager to oblige in pursuit of power.

This little historical detail, that the anti-abortion movement is a con job by racists to get revenge on Democrats for Civil Rights, is rarely discussed. But most things in this country boil down to racism in some form or fashion, which is why we don't talk about it.

Which is not to say Republicans and evangelicals aren't all in on controlling women and banishing LGBT folks to the sidelines, if not killing us outright. Those are old hatreds, too, and changing gender roles freak them out almost as much as desegregation.

It's all connected.

It's partly about the realignment of American politics along racial lines. Reagan had no qualms signing into law a liberal abortion bill in 1967. As late as 1980, he was railing against the forced desegregation of private Christian schools, not abortion.

When whites were the primary beneficiaries of liberal social and economic policies prior to desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement, Republicans had no problems with them whatsoever. The more the merrier. White women want abortions? Okay.

Abortion was once described as a "Catholic problem" about which Republicans and evangelical Protestants could hardly care less. Evangelicals weren't even political back then. Not like they are now. Civil Rights changed all that, almost overnight.

Catholics, it should be said, were solidly Democratic until the 1960s and 70s via Irish and Italian immigrants. Abortion (and later gay marriage and other issues) was used to split mostly white Catholics to the GOP via political alliances with evangelicals.

Catholics still lean slightly Democratic thanks to Hispanic and Latino immigrants, who themselves are conservative on abortion and similar issues and occasionally swing Republican because of it, but they are fairly evenly split otherwise.

You'll recall Ted Cruz and Rick Scott won in 2018 in part because they pulled a significant amount of the Hispanic vote, and this could become a severe problem for Democrats going forward if Republicans ever get their heads out of their asses.

In contrast, black evangelicals vote Democratic almost unanimously. In Alabama, they backed Doug Jones at 96%. But Jones lost virtually the entire white demographic to Roy Moore except non-evangelicals.

Of course, punditry tends to overlook non-white religious groups, preferring to address the concerns of white evangelicals almost exclusively. People inexplicably forget that MLK was a Baptist minister! The racial divide in American religion and politics goes all but unmentioned.

The point being that the GOP has only a vestigial sense of being "the party of fiscal responsibility," having frittered that away decades ago, and remade itself entirely around hot button "religious" issues and racial grievance. Nixon wouldn't recognize the modern GOP.

Even today, Republicans like to snark they're "the party of Lincoln" and "Democrats started the KKK" without once mentioning or putting any apparent thought into how and why the parties reversed positions, and they'd much rather you didn't think about it either.

To put it simply, the modern GOP's illiberal, anti-government stance derives entirely from their opposition to desegregation and Civil Rights. That's it.

Republicans have subsumed their bigotry into and disguised it as a host of "moral" and "freedom" issues portrayed in black and white. They're good and Democrats / liberals / socialists are evil.

The worst part is virtually the entire white male media lets them get away with it.

It should also be noted that there's an entire faction of white and Christian leftists whose leftism is primarily economic and material and who have an affinity for Republicans that seems peculiar at first glance in light of the GOP's rabid anti-socialism.

The fact of the matter is quite a few ostensible leftists are willing to throw women, PoC, and LGBT folks under the bus in order to align with white conservatives and create their own version of a "moral majority," whether they are TERFs or what have you.

I've mentioned before there's a white populist left keen on returning Democrats to the pre-Civil Rights era, hoping to pull white workers away from the GOP for a "progressive" supermajority aimed at a kind of white's only socialism. You know. Like the "good old days."

Even conservatives were open to progressive economics and social liberalism, they reason, back when whites were the sole beneficiaries. All they have to do is eliminate those pesky "identity politics" getting in the way, and the Democrats promoting them.

(That means us.)

This sort of thinking is evident from leftists like Bernie Sanders, who harps on the plight of the white workers while dismissing the racial wealth gap, who claims immigrants hurt white workers, and who called Planned Parenthood part of the evil "establishment."

Similarly, there are plenty of white "radical feminists," including some cis lesbian and bi women, who are all too eager to help the Religious Right bury trans people. Literally. Despite being ostensibly on the left.

A calculation has been made in the minds of these "leftists" that the GOP's convergence of racism and "moral" issues has been wildly successful, and their own path forward lies either in hijacking it or, more likely, hitching their wagons to it.

In other words, the White Left and its various subcultures are betting on old school racial solidarity and conservative tolerance to insulate themselves from the repercussions that would inevitably fall upon PoC, (other) women, and (other) LGBT folks.

There probably aren't a lot of these backstabbers, but they've proven themselves a useful fifth column for undermining Democrats and progressivism, especially with Trump, who has gotten away with saying the quiet parts loud, consequence free.

In some ways, Trump is the ultimate expression of the GOP's sham moralism. A New York con man, failure, philanderer, and former Democrat who's flip-flopped on abortion and LGBT rights but who's been absolutely embraced by white evangelicals for his virulent racism.

Just as Republicans converted to evangelicalism en masse in the late 1970s and 80s, they have adopted Trumpism just as quickly and with the exact same goal: power. The power to enrich themselves, to be bigots, to turn back the clock of American progress.